HALP, PC won't boot

[Auspice]

Woke up this morning to my PC blue screening on the Windows 7 boot up and had the error "\boot\bcd is 0xc000000f" when I tried to restart in safe mode it did the same thing. 3rd try it started running scandisk and after 3 hours it finished and the system hanged on "unable to set chkdsk ran once flag" and now it's telling me "a disk read error has occured Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart" and won't get past it.

What the fuck is going on? Everything was fine 12 hours ago, got a friend bringing over his Windows 7 disc since mine is MIA, should a installation fix solve the problem or is there something more sinister afoot?

[Sonomaa]

might be hard drive actually, toss a spare in there if you have one and try to load windows, if it goes fine your hd is kaput, if it doesnt, motherboard issues or faulty memory/video card

[Auspice]

The PC is ~4 years old and I think the boot HD is actually older than that so it's a possibility. Going to try to repair it then if not I'll just buy a new SSD(no spare drives hanging around the house sadly) and do a fresh install. I really hope that the repair(or a new drive will fix it), if not looks like I'm doing an upgrade!

Ran the Startup Repair twice and even though it says it repaired the boot sector, it still fails on bootup. I can't even look at the drive; it says Windows cannot access it. It's weird because I have the drive partitioned and the one without my Windows install is able to be read perfectly fine. Maybe this is a motherboard issue?

[Mafai]

Pull the drive and try to boot into like memtest86 or something.

If it can get into memtest and run a few passes on memory you know its not your memory / mobo and most likely your HDD.

[Auspice]

Can't I run a memory test with the Windows 7 utilities?

EDIT: Nevermind, can't seem to run it because the boot partition is fucked.

[Auspice]

Bumping since I'm still attempting to fix this old PC while my new parts for my new build are in transit. I'm not entirely convinced the hard drive is completely broken because it's partitioned and only the windows partition is not accessible. I can look at the contents of the 2nd partition in DOS prompt fine but the OS partition just says "the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"

At this point, I'm just hoping I can recover the user data from the OS partition since most of my data is already on my 1.5TB data drive and the programs partition appears to be fine.

Two questions:

1)Can I fix the 1st partition on the existing computer?
1a)If so, how?
2) If that isn't an option, what are the chances I can hook the drive up to my new PC and recover the data on the new PC?

I don't have an external HDD to use but I've got plenty of room on my data drive to put things on.

EDIT: Side question, after this ordeal is over; how can I test my memory and motherboard to see if they are alright? I'd like to rebuild the old PC and use it as well.

[Isiolia]

If you can get the 7 DVD booting it, try running an MBR fix. Could be that the partition map is screwed and that's why it can't see the boot partition properly. There was some malware recently that was infecting the boot sector, so it may be that too. I'd try the steps here if you haven't (7 should be the same as Vista there).

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ has some memory n' other tests if you like. You might try running on a live CD of some kind (probably Linux) as both a hardware test and to get access to some other tools to try and repair/recover data (like this maybe - I've had mixed results with methods I've tried, but mostly I just pull drives and scan them with Windows tools).

[Auspice]

I tried running the MBR fix and all the options I could google to try with command prompt. Startup repair didn't do anything either.

I'm hoping I can diagnose it with my new PC when it gets up and running in a couple of days. Until then I was just trying to get some opinions.

I nearly forgot to mention, when it ran a check disk it took HOURS and the screen was scrolling with hundreds upon hundreds of errors that it was fixing. Apparently I'm going to have some data loss from running that too. :/

[Auspice]

Downloaded TestDisk and it doesn't look good. Nearly all the files aren't showing up. Just got EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard so hopefully I can track down more files. Ugh, any other advice on what to do besides spend hundreds sending the drive in to a data recovery center? The hard drive itself is in perfect working order so thankfully(?) it appears to be a logic failure but I'm afraid the Win 7 tools I ran from the setup disc on it last week completely fucked me out of my data.

EDIT: Forgot to mention a couple of things. I got TestDisk to spit out an image of what it found in a .dd file but I have no fucking clue how to use it. The only link I found was for some 32bit program from 1991 that I can't even run on Win 7. Also, EASEUS found some interesting things that TestDisk didn't like a lot more files. When it brought up the readout of the hard drive it showed nearly 2 dozen partitions with handfuls of files. I can't make heads or tails of most of what I'm looking at here since they are random file fragments but one of the larger chunks showed some system restore points. Any chance I can use those to get back some of the data?

[Isiolia]

I've not really seen chkdsk try to fix that much stuff and it not be an actual drive issue as well. Haven't tended to see it ruin data. Can't always fix much of course.

There are still other tools to try if you can't see files. I've had some success with PC Insptector File Recovery, which is free. You could also try Recuva if you haven't.

DD is a Unix low level disk copy/write utility. Is the .dd file a HDD image? Or is it something smaller? My only real experience using DD was for forensics exercises, where we'd make an image of a HDD to scan rather than risk modifying the original. If it's something that'd be large enough for that, you'd likely write it back to another drive, or as an image you could mount (similar to this perhaps).

I doubt the system restore points would do you much good unless they could restore the system to booting.

[SephYuyX]

If it wasnt mentioned already, take that HDD out and slave it to another PC and see if you can access the data via a normal means.
If not, find some recovery software and run it to pull any files it can find, and then format the sucker.

[Auspice]

If it wasnt mentioned already, take that HDD out and slave it to another PC and see if you can access the data via a normal means.
If not, find some recovery software and run it to pull any files it can find, and then format the sucker.

I've got it hooked up to my new PC now; Disk Manager shows the name I assigned to both partitions but the system partition says it's RAW instead of NTFS and says it's a healthy, active partition and shows the correct size. In My Computer it shows 0 bytes for the size though and says "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable."

I'll try some of the software listed above and hopefully get some of my files off of it.

[Auspice]

PC Inspector File Recovery didn't find anything that EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard didn't already grab and Recuva is hanging at 25% scanning the drive(Well, it's been sitting at 25% for the past 15 minutes and the estimated time left keeps climbing).

Things definitely aren't going well for me on this. It blows because there's really only a handful of files I need off of the partition and I can't even get those! >_<

EDIT: Here's basically what EASEUS and PCIFR have shown me:

he root drive is missing nearly all the Windows folders like programs/users/etc
Under deleted files there are tons and tons of folders called "MFT XXXXX" where XXXXX is a bunch of numbers and in those folders are files with random letter and number combinations, no idea what the hell they are.

I'm not sure what more I'm going to find(if Recuva actually finishes loading the files it's seeing) if anything or if I've got any more options besides spending hundreds sending it off to possibly have data recovered.

[Niya]

Sounds like the MFT (master file table) got damaged/deleted. That's where the NTFS file system keeps track of what file/folder is stored in which sector on the HDD. So basically, those recovery tools can only scan sector after sector and look for familiar patterns that match certain file formats. You may have luck and one of the tools finds a fragment or all of your important files. You may have to go through hundreds of those fragments and puzzle your files back together when they were scattered across several sectors.
I wish you good luck.

[Auspice]

I found nearly 36k files and almost 50gb of data that was "lost/deleted" but with everything renamed and a lot of stuff with weird file extensions I don't even know where to begin to look for stuff. The file structure is completely gone. Looking for a bookmarks file, some Minecraft saves, XI macros, and some other misc stuff seems like a needle in a haystack.